Video - Poet Jesús Papoleto Meléndez @ The Inspired Word

Jesús Papoleto Meléndez is a performance and visual poet, and one of the remaining original founders of the Nuyorican Poets' Movement. His poetry publications include Casting Long Shadows (1970), Have You Seen Liberation (1971), Street Poetry & Other Poems (1972), and Concertos on Market Street (1994). His play, The Junkies Stole the Clock (1974), was the first production of Joseph Papp's Public Theatre, New York Shakespeare Festival's Nuyorican Playwrights' Unit. He also formed "Nuroyrican School Original Poetry Jazz Ensemble" with Americo Casiano.Meléndez has received "The Rev. Pedro Pietri Hand Award in Poetry/Playwriting" (2006); "The 2004 Louis Reyes Rivera Lifetime Achievement Award" from Amherst College; a 2001-NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Fellowship in Poetry; the Artist for Community Enrichment (ACE) Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts in 1995; and a COMBO (Combined Arts of San Diego)-NEA Fellowship in Literature. He has performed his poetry with El Reverendo Pedro Pietri at the Folger-Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC. " My poems are written in a stylized technique of word-visualization, which I refer to as 'Cascadance,' because the words seem to cascade down the page in a form of dance," he says. "The words 'play' with their associations to the words around them, becoming a visual statement that the words are making as images upon the page; a kind of visual poetry."

The Inspired Word is New York City's hottest new spoken word poetry open mic series happening every Tuesday and Thursday night in downtown Manhattan, produced by longtime journalist and former Village Voice columnist Mike Geffner and hosted by HBO Def Poetry star Gemineye and the NYC spoken word legend Nathan P.